Dr. O

by Robert W. Walker

  He was much pleased with himself. He went back to the chart room, where he had installed a computer. He turned it on and pulled up the file he wanted. He'd gotten the information required to access Thorpe's computer from Bateman, who had become a sniveling creature in the end. He had used Bateman's code at first; this was soon cut off to him, yet it had been long enough for his computer to take over on a modem and begin a random selection to search for Thorpe's code. For some time now he'd known her every move before she did.

  He decided to call her electronically. By the time they traced it he'd be gone.

  He typed out his message and it was conveyed to her terminal in Nebraska. From there it would flash to any other she might be using.

  Donna Thorpe hadn't slept since Hogarth and her child had disappeared with Robyn Muro. She paced before her people at the Hilton suite, where all information statewide and along the coast was being monitored. The car was found, charred to the tires, at an overlook point along the Pacific Coast highway. The news burned like ice through her veins. The information was helpful in giving them a lead and units had been dispatched. She wanted to rush there herself, but she was suddenly stopped by one of the computer clerks, who said there was a Priority One message coming through for her on her terminal.

  She went to the terminal, pressing her code. It was either news from Quantico or Nebraska, she wasn't sure yet.

  Then it came up.

  Hogarth is executed. Give me Pythagoras and the killings will end.

  "Bastard... bastard's on line. Corey, Corey, trace this. Get on it and work on it until you drop. This damned job is Priority One for your people. Got that?"

  "Yes, Inspector, right away."

  She grit her teeth. "So, he wants Pythagoras. Don't we all," she said to herself. Then she ordered a man to bring her car around. "We're going to Oregon."

  "That won't be necessary, Inspector," said one of her agents who handed her a radio receiver headphone. "It's Muro."

  "Muro, you damned fool! Where are you?"

  "Never mind where I am. I'm alive, and lucky—"

  "I know, Hogarth and the child are dead. Ovierto has just told me so along with the men who found the car."

  "Ovierto?"

  "The bastard just contacted me."

  "He wants Pythagoras, the whole thing, doesn't he?"

  "Yes, yes, he does."

  "Are you going to deal with him?"

  "Yes, we are."

  "Washington approves?"

  "To hell with Washington. This is my call."

  Both of them knew that their conversation was being monitored by Ovierto, and they fed him what he wanted to hear. Thorpe played off her beautifully, Robyn thought, if only because she really did believe Hogarth and the child dead. Robyn decided to keep it that way until she could speak to Donna Thorpe face to face.

  "With the information Hogarth had," Thorpe continued, "we have a complete package on Pythagoras. I say we give it to him before more lives are lost."

  "But if he uses it for... for evil..."

  "It will take years before he can mount anything useful. To get the kind of technical assistance he needs—"

  Robyn disagreed, knowing that Pythagoras could bribe anyone, but she said, "You're right. It may be our only chance to end this senseless killing spree."

  "We can't risk another child... other people any longer."

  "No... I don't suppose we can."

  "We've got to deal with Ovierto... do what he wishes, whatever is necessary. I'll see you back here shortly."

  "It would be shortly, if you'd send a car for me."

  "Hold on. Let's secure this line."

  Thorpe did so, scrambling the signal before taking any further information from Robyn.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dr. Samuel Boas was one of many associate clinical medical examiners and pathologists who worked at FBI headquarters in Quantico. At least, that is how he viewed himself. He was in fact the director of the enormous and multifaceted FBI labs, in charge of their smooth operation, the budgeting decisions and allocating time and resources among departments, persuading them to cooperate and sometimes "share," like good boys and girls there in the big sandbox when samples came to them from law enforcement agencies across the nation. The FBI crime lab at Quantico had become the ultimate in forensic medicine, forensic psychiatry, toxicology, ballistics, and questioned documents.

  Before becoming the chief of such a prestigious operation, he had been the director of the SFPD Crime Lab in San Francisco. He'd served as a consultant to universities and hospitals from D.C. to Hong Kong. His training had recently taken him into hypnosis, domination, terrorism, and victim behavior. He had been on a panel formed to understand what had occurred at Jonestown, what kinds of controls Charles Manson managed over his murderous "children," how Patty Hearst became a bona fide SLA member, and how others, held captive for years, were turned into true slaves to their masters, as in the California case of the woman called K who had for seven years endured captivity and brutality until she became the perfect slave.

  Boas belonged to a host of associations, and he wrote and published papers each year on these and related topics, as well as his well-known textbooks on forensic medicine. He had worked with the U.S. Department of Justice, Scotland Yard, Hong Kong, the CIA, the LAPD, the NYPD, and many others throughout his long career.

  And he knew the toll Ovierto was taking on the one victim he had once physically scarred. He had tried to warn Donna Thorpe about this before. It was one of the reasons he had flown to Seattle to see her face to face, along with the information he harbored about those disgusting Adam's apples, three hardened lumps of flesh now. But hidden within the curled folds of these three masses of the largest laryngeal cartilage in the throat he and his staff had discovered an amazing thing.

  Boas had held Thorpe's attention long enough for him to go over his concerns for her personal health and her mental state. She blew up at this, they had argued, and she immediately saw him as the enemy, as if he had been sent here by her superiors to watch over her like some aged vulture, to which charge there was some truth. He had so upset her that she had shut him out suddenly. Her interest in this cop from Chicago was her new obsession, and she had rushed out of the room and down to the lobby in search of Sergeant Muro.

  He hadn't been given a chance to tell her about the pearls! And then all hell broke loose at the so-called "safe house."

  In the meantime, he had consulted with several old friends, posing them a hypothetical about a police person and a fiend she had been chasing for six years now. He told them every detail that seemed relevant for them to reach a conclusion about the long-term effects of such a relationship as that between the sadomashochistic Ovierto and the steady officer Thorpe. They in turn had asked a thousand questions which helped to bolster the hypothetical, such as those concerning her personal supports. He told them of the rocky home life and the fact that the murderer had killed her lover.

  To a man, they agreed with almost all of his own assessments of what Thorpe was going through, and yet there seemed to be no way to communicate these concerns to her. She closed him out. She needed someone she could wholly confide in, but he seemed not to be that person.

  And yet his superiors believed that he had some magical quality or trick up his sleeve to garner that very prize from Inspector Thorpe —her complete trust and confidence. He didn't like the role they had cast him in, didn't like going behind Donna's back, trying to convince Washington that she was all right, and that they hadn't misplaced their trust.

  Boas had been in forensics for the better part of a half a century, but he had never seen anything like the cat-and-mouse game being played out between Donna Thorpe and this madman, Ovierto. Somehow Ovierto knew her every move, and he even played the forensics people for fools on occasion, as he had with the Adam's apples sent to Nebraska. The men there hadn't seen the careful, almost invisible work done by the mad doctor, whose hands must surely be skillful indeed. He'd hidde
n a clue in the folds of skin in the laryngeal tissue.

  Boas had come to Seattle for good reason. If Ovierto were here, perhaps what he had found embedded in the flesh of the apples could help Thorpe. He had kept his find to himself, telling no one, not even his assistants. He had not told Thorpe, either, why he must see her in Seattle.

  She had told him to come ahead but said that on his stopover in Chicago he was to pick up a passenger, a policewoman named Muro. The doctor agreed to do so, and he agreed to share his lurid files with Robyn Muro if that would make everyone happy.

  When he had finally gotten Thorpe alone to tell her of the bizarre find, she'd bolted from him, discovering that Sergeant Muro had disappeared, locating her in the lobby of the hotel. It wasn't until a day later, after he learned of news of the attack at the winery, that Dr. Boas had again been able to get Thorpe alone, insisting on ten minutes.

  Thorpe looked as if she'd gone without sleep all night, and Boas guessed this was the case. "I've got to get back to D.C. in a few hours. Now, you're going to listen to me."

  "Of course, Dr. Boas, what is it?" she said, ransacking the room for the water, ice, and booze. Boas had noticed the drinking before.

  "It's about Dr. Ovierto's most recent gift to you, the gift of the apples."

  "Yes, what about them?"

  "Embedded in each was a pearl."

  "A pearl?"

  "Not your most exquisite pearls, but yes, pearls. Here they are."

  He placed them in a clean ashtray he found on the table between them. He stared at the glistening, white- and-ivory beads as they collided with each another. "What do you think it means?"

  "Who the hell knows with this son of a bitch? Casting his pearls before... swine? We being the swine?"

  "Yeah, like him to illustrate his point in such a fashion. Showing's definitely better than telling so far as Ovierto is concerned."

  "Any rate, I've done some checking around the piers and-"

  "Why Boas, you?"

  "Just an itch I had to scratch. Any rate, the pearls come in at only one location."

  "Pearls? Imported to here?"

  "Yes, from the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, Australia and China, but they all go through customs and customs is located at Pier Thirty-four. Now, I figure, these being obviously untouched—"

  "Boas, you old hound. This could be important."

  "Why the hell do you think I came all the way from D.C.?"

  "Who else knows about the pearls?"

  "Not a soul."

  "No one?"

  "You and me." He could see her pulse pounding in her temple. "This could be it. Could be it... could be..."

  "I wish I could stay to see it through, but—"

  "Get clearance. We may need you. Tell them I want you here, Doctor, please."

  He frowned. "I've been away too long as it is."

  "Try."

  "All right, but it will be useless."

  "Thanks, Dr. Boas... thanks."

  "Thank me if and when it pans out."

  Donna Thorpe didn't waste a moment more, leading the convergence on Pier Thirty-four at the Seattle Port Authority. The Port Authority officers were waiting outside a hulking old ship that looked as if it were bleeding rust, the name barely discernable where it had worn away: Zembabwe Jewel. Thorpe could feel her pulse racing. She sensed he was here, puttering around inside, doing something trivial like putting on his socks or going to the john. Seattle police had still been unable to locate the three John Does whose throats had been cut for their voice boxes. Perhaps, she thought, the bodies were in a refrigeration hold on board the ship. Boas had told her that two victims had been women, the third a man.

  She indicated with an angry gesture that everyone was to keep down and keep still. They moved out quietly from the custom's building. "We go in with extreme caution," she told the others, four of her Nebraska men, two Seattle agents, and another five Port Authority policemen. They started up the ramp.

  The ship was large, lumbering atop the water like a city dump on a barge. Odors welling up through the unused holds reminded her of dumps also.

  "She's an old steamer, original registration Rhodesia," said the head of the PA men. "Now it's registered to a Mr. Bateman—"

  "Bateman?" She knew he saw her shiver. She had already begun to feel certain that this was one of Ovierto's dumping sites. Like the Colorado mine shaft, it would appeal to him. Now the mention of a registration to a man named Bateman —it had to be more than coincidence, and knowing the dark sense of humor Ovierto possessed, it certainly seemed the work of the monster.

  She signaled for some of the agents to go forward, others aft, as the PA officers guarded the decks. Boas was on Thorpe's arm, and now he brought out his own revolver as they descended the metal stairs into the semidarkness of a hold. The stench was unmistakable and overpowering in the dark, the odor of decaying human flesh accompanied by the sound of feeding flies and gnawing rats.

  "I think you can safely say we've found his leavings," said Boas with the tone of a man resigned to the worst.

  She turned on the heavy-duty lantern given her by one of the PA guys, and at the end of its flash she saw the raw, skinned body of a long-legged woman being devoured by rats.

  "Jeeeeezusssss, oh, God!" she said. "You picked it, Boas."

  "I'm going to need some assistance from an SPD team."

  "Foster, go up and make the request."

  "There's only one body here," said Boas, going closer, chasing off the vermin with gunny sacks filled with rotten vegetables.

  "The other two are here, somewhere," she said.

  A shot was fired in another part of the ship, far to the bow. "Come on," she said to Boas who ambled be-hind her, as she pushed through a door and found her-self in a narrow passageway, rushing forward. "I want that bastard! He's mine!"

  The pair clanged along the metal walkways, up ladders and through hatches. "Do you know where you're going?" shouted Boas when suddenly she shouted, "Duck!"

  Shots rang out and Thorpe fired once, twice, three, four, five, six times, drilling the man who had fired at her until his body was rammed against a bulkhead, blood oozing out of his chest where each of her bullets had hit him. Boas got to his feet, watching from below on the ladder, his eyes even with the floor above, at eye-level with the newly killed man. He'd watched the body slide to the floor in a dark shadowed corner of the room she'd burst into. It was the galley and the man had pulled down pots and pans over himself as he'd fallen backward.

  "I got him! I got the son of a bitch!" Thorpe was elated. "It's over! Christ, it's over."

  She was so overcome with excitement, she felt faint. Boas made his calm way past her, going to the dead man. Other agents were converging on them, someone saying, "All right! All-bloody-right! It was the rats... I fired on impulse."

  "We've got a body at the stern hold," said a third agent to Donna Thorpe. "What've you got here?"

  Thorpe turned when they entered the blackened galley and she said triumphantly, "While you Wild Bills were shooting rats, I got him! I got the bastard, Ovierto. I got Dr. O. Tell 'em Boas. Tell 'em!"

  "It's not him," said Boas dryly.

  "What?"

  "It's not Ovierto."

  "Pull off the makeup!" She rushed to the bloody corpse and tore at the gray-to-white hair, the scalp, the neck. There was no makeup.

  She was shaken. "Who is he? Who the hell is he?"

  "He fired on you," Boas reminded her.

  "But who the hell is he? He's not one of ours, not PA."

  Boas fished for some identification. He found the light and read, "William Rosenthaler, M.D."

  "Rosenthaler! Damn, damn! Search the rest of the ship for Ovierto! Now, now! And take extreme care!" she shouted at her agents, knowing that Ovierto was not here; that he had set up Rosenthaler to stand in for him at this location as he had Deter Fomichs in Chicago.

  "Rosenthaler was a friend of your father's," Boas said.

  "I know that."


  "I had thought he was... dead."

  "He was institutionalized some years back when Ovierto got to him. Literally drove him mad. Up until yesterday, I had an agent guarding the asylum, but after the loses we sustained at the winery... he was pulled."

  "Don't blame yourself, Donna."

  "Who else do I blame, Doc? I'm in charge, and Washington's turned it back over to me since I pegged Chicago as his next target. Now this."

  One of her agents popped his head back in. "We've found another body, stuffed in a bin."

  "That's number three," said Boas. "All will have had their throats surgically removed."

  "And Rosenthaler makes four," she said, staring at the man at her feet.

  "Come on, Donna. I'll take charge here now," said Boas. "You get back to HQ. Come on."

  Boas led her out and only the open air of the sea above decks brought her around. She straightened, pulled free of his guiding hand, and said, "I'll see you off when you finish here. Don't have to tell you —anything you find that might help, let us know. We were close this time, thanks to you, Doc."

  "Yes... yes, we were."

  "Too bad it's not horseshoes, huh?"

  "Now there's a game I can keep up with," he said with a little laugh. He snatched out a filter tipped cigarette.

  "Thought you gave that up?"

  "Did... but times... like this... call for a smoke."

  "It was nice having you with us, Dr. Boas. Wish you could stay."

  He laughed. "You have been away from Jim too long!"

  "Hey, Boas, if I weren't married..."

  Now the older man blushed. "And if I weren't old enough to be your father."

  She kissed him on the cheek and for a time they stared out at the harbor and the open sea in the distance, sharing the moment. It was short-lived; a few seconds later one of her agents told her that Muro had been located and returned to the Hilton.